Once last week’s meeting in Riyadh between US and Russian negotiators was over, one member of Moscow’s delegation stayed behind for an informal one-on-one with the host of the historic talks, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
It was Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, pictured smiling and chatting with the kingdom’s leader.
A US-educated former Goldman Sachs banker, with no formal diplomatic role at the time, Dmitriev cut an unexpected figure at the talks next to more conventional members of the Russian delegation such as foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
But it is Dmitriev’s unofficial role as Russia’s bridge-builder with the Gulf and his longtime relationship with the Crown Prince that seems to have played a role in paving the way for the talks, the US team said.
Dmitriev has remained both plugged into the world of international finance and a regular in the Kremlin’s halls. He works closely with the sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East. He has been reported, in the past, to have had contact with key players around Donald Trump.
“We got reach-out from someone in Russia, who you know. Kirill,” Steve Witkoff, a member of the US delegation, told Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner at a public panel event after the negotiations in Riyadh. “That was in large part engineered by his Highness Mohammed bin Salman.”
He did not specify it was Dmitriev. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund credited Vladimir Putin and Trump with organising the talks and would not comment on any role he may have played in the effort. “The key role here is the presidents and their very, I would say, unambiguous instructions,” Dmitriev said.
Witkoff said assurances from the Saudi Arabian side then led to his own trip to Russia in early February and the release of US detainee Mark Fogel. “They assured us that this was real, that there was real validity to Kirill and what he was saying could happen,” Witkoff said.
On Sunday, Dmitriev was formally appointed Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic co-operation with foreign countries.
Dmitriev, 49, has led the Russian Direct Investment Fund since its founding in 2011 as a vehicle for enticing international investment into Russia. With RDIF geared in its early years towards investments from the US, he was well-placed to lead the Kremlin’s new $10bn fund.
Born in Kyiv but educated at Stanford and Harvard Business School in the US, with stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs on his resume, Dmitriev worked for much of the 2000s at Delta Private Equity in Moscow, a branch of a US government fund established to channel private American investment into Russia.
But Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and an array of sanctions — including on the state development company VEB under which the fund had initially been established — led much western interest to cool. Several Wall Street billionaires and renowned asset managers stepped down from RDIF’s advisory board.
Focus shifted to other markets, and Dmitriev appeared more often in Moscow’s dealings with the Gulf, including joining Russian negotiations on balancing oil supply via Opec+.
Politics and dealmaking went hand-in-hand, a former RDIF employee said, and “on the Saudi track, he was always number one”.
“He performed an important function as an intermediary with the various players in the Gulf monarchies,” Carnegie expert Alexandra Prokopenko said. “He knows the sheikhs, he knows who has what money and what interests.”
By 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds made up more than two-thirds of all holdings by foreign governments in Russia, according to analysis by Global SWF.
But the structure of RDIF’s deals, which Dmitriev reports in person to Putin, was never fully made public. The fund says it has brought more than $26bn worth of investments into the Russian economy, but “we only know about RDIF’s achievements from RDIF’s own words”, Prokopenko said. “The investment strategy is not transparent, and RDIF has invested quite actively in its own PR.”
An employee of one of the Gulf funds who worked with RDIF in the past said its investment bankers were professional and the deals were solid. Dmitriev was also among those in Moscow working behind the scenes to secure the release of Michael Calvey, a big US investor in Russia, from detention after his arrest in Russia.
Dmitriev’s Gulf business ties also led to contacts with people in Trump’s circle, according to US special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Dmitriev leveraged his contacts in the United Arab Emirates, a country that invests in RDIF, to establish a connection with the first Trump administration, Mueller reported. The US special counsel did not conclude that these contacts led to anything unlawful.
Asked whether past contacts with key players around Trump contributed to the meeting this month in Riyadh, Dmitriev said no and declined to comment further.
“All I can say is that if you look, I’ve historically always been in favour of developing the US-Russia relationship,” Dmitriev said, speaking by phone from Riyadh.
Dmitriev told the Financial Times that negotiators had set up a separate track to run alongside political negotiations that would focus on business deals. “Within the Russian delegation, I am responsible for economic investment projects and building bridges,” he said. “Both sides are interested in finding joint economically justified projects.”
Dmitriev informed US negotiators in Riyadh that $324bn had been lost by US companies as a result of withdrawing from the Russian market.
However, the KSE Institute, an analytical centre at the Kyiv School of Economics, says US companies only had $52bn in assets in Russia before the full-scale invasion began in 2022.
RDIF said the “numbers are based on the announced write-offs of the Russian assets and assessment of the foregone fair market value due to lost cash flows generated by the asset”.
The wealth fund boss also has proximity to Putin’s family. His wife, Natalia Popova, remains the deputy director of Innopraktika, the technology foundation of Yekaterina Tikhonova, Putin’s younger daughter. Dmitriev was also on the board of a major petrochemicals company where Tikhonova’s then husband was a senior executive.
Former RDIF employees said that while building his network abroad, at home Dmitriev was “a very tough manager” and a “perfectionist”.
“All the horrors you can find in books detailing the lives of Wall Street interns, we had all of those,” said one person, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about their former employer. “People have burnt out . . . Life was tough.” Dmitriev and RDIF did not comment on workplace culture.
Putin entrusted his sovereign wealth fund chief with several other key projects, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Dmitriev, whose parents were both biologists, took on the role of developer and chief promoter of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine.
Dmitriev was so proud of the Sputnik vaccine he and his family inoculated themselves with it. He also asked staffers to look into putting the scientists behind the Russian vaccine forward for the Nobel Prize, two people said.
On Monday, Dmitriev launched an X account to mark his new role as a special envoy on the negotiating team. “Russia is open,” he said, to new US-Russia business ties.
Additional reporting by Antoine Gara in Miami
